Week 16 : Skills resume

Well the weeks keep trucking along, we just passed the six month mark for this experiment. There have been some promising developments but we'll keep them under wraps until something more substantial shows up. In the meantime I wanted to share this video with you

Skills Resume

I never could understand how a resume could be effective at only one page long, it turns out what I though was a resume was really a Curriculum Vitae (CV). To be fair my father always refereed to them as CVs and he probably was the person who taught me how to compile one.

On the other hand, a Skills resume, is designed to target all the buzz words in a job description. Let's say the Job Description is :

• Lead teams of designers, writers and directors to drive the overall creative vision for our games.
• Foster collaborative and successful working partnerships with our clients and departments across the studio.

 So instead of hoping that the HR person would notice the Lead Designer from the list of projects I have on my CV. I would target those bullet points directly.

• Facilitated game design features and requirement for both creative and development team.
• Organized quality assurance for assets shared between collaborating contractors on Disney's Epcot Attractions.

As you see these points are more direct. Point is I am going to start tuning my resume writing process and I suggest you watch the video and do the same.


See you in Twenty Five weeks

Week 15 : OpenCV and PHI

This week I want to show you something neat. There is a number called Phi, the golden ratio that was discovered by the Greeks the Ratio is as follows

(A+B)/A = A/B
Phi turns out to be 1.61803399...

This Ratio was used to build the Pyramids, the Parthenon and is found is good design even today.

So I wanted to see if there was a way I can use this ratio with facial detection. In openCV you can use Haar cascade to find parts of the face

like so

Promising right?!?!

Well unfortunately you are seeing a lot of redundancy and false positives in that images, some of the boxes around the eye might actually be determined when looking for a mouth. Luckily the general face detector is pretty good, and if you use the biggest box you get have a decent start.

By using the face rectangle's height as a starting point I could extrapolate the width of the face with Phi

Coincidentally the line separating A and B tends to lie where the eyes are on the face. So I extrapolated some more.

Here is the breakdown

   Phi A/B = (A+B)/A = 1.618033988749894848204586834

   Outer White lines - Detected Facial Height with Haar Cascades (A+B)

   Teal Lines - Phi derived Facial Width  (Height / phi)  (A)

   Green Lines - Predicted location of eyes  by breaking Height into A + B

   Blue lines - Predicted eye and mouth width (B = A')

   Red + Inner White line - Predicted mouth height  (A'' + B''  = A' = B)   

   Red line - Predicted nose height (A'')

   Purple line - Predicted nose width (B'')

   Teal circles  - Best possible eye locations using Phi in conjunction with Haar Cascades. 

Interesting huh?!?! Most interesting Phi can be used to help find the best rectangle for certain facial features.

If you'd like to see more images check out my Facebook site

Facebook site

Or 

Check out a Presentation I made posted at 

Google Drive Or LinkedIn

See you in Twenty Six Weeks

Week 14 : Applications

Well, with the advent of the leak at the house I have decided to focus my attention on something I can move forward on, applications. That is to say as of last week I submitted my first two applications to TellTale Games, for Interactive Story Designer (the golden job) and Build Engineer. Let's be honest if I can't land a job within these forty weeks this whole adventure is all for naught. I let my boss review the material I was sending, he is a hiring manager, he seemed supportive and used the term 'convincing' so let's hope TellTale's hiring manager feels the same.

As of today I can tell you that I 'may' have passed the first filter for the 'Golden Job', how do I know?
Well I was rejected for the Build Engineer position. Which is fine I am better suited to making game play elements anyway. So instead of looking at it as a loss I am keeping a positive attitude and am acting as thought I made it through round one, I suppose the next round starts with them contacting me.

Meanwhile I also applied to Rockstar's Tools, Game Play and AI programmer positions. Each of these roles I would easily succeed in. As well as applied to Irrational Games, they just have a single programming field to apply to. Heck always keep your options open and aim high, all they can do is say no, but just imagine if they all said yes?!?!

I must admit this is exciting and nerve racking, with each application I imagine how the interview will go. The hard part is the waiting. Granted I am applying just over six months before I am available, but hey after the horrors stories I have hear from the crash of '08 I feel I am right on target.


See you in Twenty Seven Weeks

Week 13 : Tenacity

I am always amazed how unpredictable life can be, no matter how hard you plan things out problems crop up. In an effort to make my transition to California as smooth as possible I had started fixing up my house in Kentucky for sale. As of two weeks ago the porch was redone, and it was on the market. However last week my tenets told me about loosing hot water and a rushing sound. Well several plumbers later it seems there is a leak in the slab. Long story short we have to re route the plumbing. Sadly this cuts into my profits but in for a penny in for a pound I suppose. At least now I have a reason to redo the kitchen and in turn I can charge more money. Always look on the bright side!

Let it be a leak in a house or a bug in the code, I have found you must be tenacious. Come up with a plan and execute, if the plan looks like it will fail, time to re plan. There is no one solution, free will and acts of god will always present challenges. But hey if there wasn't these bad times how would you learn to appreciate the good times. Life is a series of peaks and valleys, when you are in a valley keep your head on that next peak and you will get there.



See you in Twenty Eight Weeks

Week 12 : Comics

This week I'd like to talk comics. The fact that Tell Tale Games sees the importance of comics for source material is a HUGE reason I want to work with them. I have read comics all of my life, aside from a small break from high school through my bachelors. Comics taught me to read, manage money and gave me my first feeling of independence. You see Mom couldn't leave the car in the parking lot next to the comic store or it would be towed, so I was given the money and freedom to buy whatever I wanted, quite a lot of responsibility for a seven year old.

In the beginning I was a die hard Marvel fan particularly the X-men, Captain America and Hawkeye. In actuality I loved the costumes, one enemy I really liked was Madcap, he had a clown like suit and could reattach his own limbs and make people crazy if they looked into his eyes. I favored the art so much it started me drawing. I had collected the Marvel Universe volumes, which had all the living and dead characters over the years.I would research any characters that had a sweet outfit and draw them.

My nephew re introduced me to comics with the 'Walking Dead' and Marvel's Ultimate series after college. So you see I was an avid 'Walking Dead' fan well before the show or the game. The writer Robert Kirkman is a fellow Kentuckian, as well as the original artist Tony Moore. I loved their work and wanted to support fellow local artists. At that time I took it upon myself to fill in the gaps in comic lore by reading 'The Watchmen', and 'The Sandman' series. But it was the newer comics that got me hooked again. I realized it wasn't the publisher that I liked it was the writers. So I expanded my Kirkman collection to include 'Invincible'. Next was Bill Willingham and 'Fables', I really like the concept and have read all of them as well as the off shoot comics like 'Jack the Fable'. Then I found Brian K Vaughn who wrote 'Y the Last man', 'Ex Machina' and most currently 'Saga' by far he is my favorite. I cannot stress enough how great Saga is, it is new so go read it.

This summer I chose to fill in the gaps of Marvel's cosmic story lines including; Adam Warlock, Captain Marvel, Thanos, The Eternals, Annihilation War, Guardians of the Galaxy, the Kree and Skrulls as well as catching up with the X-men story lines. As you can see from the image below I read quite a lot this summer. I was hooked again, but I knew I was headed to California and didn't want to lug around another huge box of books, I left most of my collection in Kentucky before I came here. So I switched to kindle, If you took that photo and multiplied it by three you would be close to what I have read since the summer began.

I would like to conclude by saying I have some thoughts on 'The Wolf Among Us' but will reserve them for our interview.

See you In Twenty Nine Weeks

AR

Week 11 : Video Game Security

This week I am referring you to a research paper I just finished about Taxonomy, Authentication and Encryption for online video games

Video Game Security

Enjoy

See you in thirty weeks.

AR

Week 10 : MetaSploit

This was a very fun week, we finally got to do some true penetration tests. Until this week most of the Cyber forensics class was very theoretical with some minor application like port scanning. However we were introduced to metasploit, which is a Security analyst's dream. Metasploit is a program that shows you all the possible exploits on a particular OS. It is open sourced and constantly updated so you have wealth of information to use.

Let me explain the process,  let say you are asked to penetrate a website. Well you use dig to get the IP address of the site, you then use nmap to extract available Ports and potential operating systems. Then you use metasploit to infiltrate the computer. In class we opened up a reverse console on a Windows XP machine. We were then able to navigate, download and upload files . . .  it was very cool. This particular exploit tricked the target computer into starting the TCP connection. You see most firewall protect against incoming connections but not outgoing. So we told the target computer the attacker's IP and it opened a console to us, clever.

As I get deeper into the class I will keep you posted on what I am learning. I am also writing a paper on how to secure video games from hacker's attacks though authentication and encryption, so keep an eye out for that.

See you in thirty one weeks.